Afghan TV, part four

Adverts.

Rubbish and annoying in any country. But they do point to the aspirations and economy of the land.

Banks, mobile phones and gas bottles the main things, with catchy jingles galore.

But there a few other common tropes: I’ve noticed a few more for beauty products recently, and for private hospitals, which list all the equipment they have – ‘with microscopes, ultra sound, x-ray machine, clean needles, bedpans’ etc – while showing some poor sod being cut up for the cameras.

Public service announcements: young girls playing in a playground (there being lots of those here) notice an object that looks like a kettle. Just as they are about to touch it to see, an old man appears out of thin air and admonishes them for playing with something that might explode.

Shouting ‘thank you uncle!’ they skip off and tell the nearest friendly policeman.

Friendly policeman feature quite a lot actually. There was one showing friendly policemen doing various different jobs while telling us that this is someone’s brother, this is someone’s uncle, someone’s father and so on, thus suggesting that they may be policeman but it still wouldn’t be very nice to blow them up in a roadside bomb now would it?

And why don’t you join the police and have has much fun as they obviously are?

Some folks might not feel that kind-hearted having seen another common type though: friendlyish policeman destroying fields of poppies with scythes. (There’s a strange irony there: how poverty can force young men to grow poppies, or to join the police and cut them down.)